The paper presents, firstly, a
brief review of the long history of information ethics beginning with
the Greek
concept of parrhesia or freedom of
speech as analyzed by Michel Foucault. The recent concept of
information ethics
is related particularly to problems which arose in the last century
with the
development of computer technology and the internet. A broader concept
of
information ethics as dealing with the digital reconstruction of all
possible
phenomena leads to questions relating to digital ontology. Following Heidegger’s conception of the relation
between
ontology and metaphysics, the author argues that ontology has to do
with Being
itself and not just with the Being of beings which is the matter of
metaphysics. The primary aim of an ontological foundation of
information ethics
is to question the metaphysical ambitions of digital ontology
understood as
today’s pervading understanding of Being. The author analyzes some
challenges
of digital technology, particularly with regard to the moral status of
digital
agents. The author argues that information ethics does not only deal
with
ethical questions relating to the infosphere.
This view is contrasted with arguments presented by Luciano Floridi on
the
foundation of information ethics as well as on the moral status of
digital
agents. It is argued that a reductionist view of the human body as
digital data
overlooks the limits of digital ontology and gives up onebasis for ethical orientation. Finally issues
related to the digital divide as well
as to intercultural aspects of information ethics are explored – and
long and
short-term agendas for appropriate responses are presented.

INTRODUCTION

Information
ethics has a long and a short history. The long history in the Western
tradition goes back to the question of parrhesia
or freedom of speech in ancient Greece.
In his lectures on parrhesia at the University of California at Berkeley Michel
Foucault
analyzes the difference between parrhesia
and rhetoric (Foucault 1983). According to Foucault, dialogue is a
major parrhesiastic technique in opposition to
a long rhetorical or sophistical speech. Parrhesia
is essential to Athenian democracy. It is a form of criticism in which
the
speaker is in a position of inferiority with regard to his
interlocutor. The parrhesiastes is the one who speaks
the
truth at his – and “he” is the right word in this context – own risk.
To tell
what one believes to be the truth can be dangerous in a specific
situation, for
instance when addressing a tyrant, in which case parrhesia
becomes a moral quality. But also the democratic parrhesia
can be dangerous for a citizen
opposing his truth to that of the majority. The aim of such verbal
truth-telling activity is to help other people (or himself) by choosing
frankness instead of persuasion. As Foucault remarks, Athenian
democracy was
defined by the equal right of speech (isegoria),
the equal participation of all citizens in the exercise of power (isonomia) and the personal attitude of
the good citizen as truth-teller (parrhesia).
This kind of public speech takes place in the Athenian agora.

Parrhesia is thus not
just based on what one believes to be the truth but implies a personal
as well
as a public commitment to this belief. The knowledge of the believer is
linked
to his or her being. It concerns the truth about his own being. “To
tell the
truth” becomes a moral imperative under particular conditions. The
subject of
the utterance is aware of what should be as well as of the risks for
her own
being in case she publicly negates a state of affairs in the name of
possible
alternatives one of which she believes to be better. Her being must be
of the
kind to make possible such a parrhesiastic
utterance. It must be, in other words, a moral being which includes her
capability to assume her existence in all its dimensions and
challenges. To
take care of one’s self(epimeleia
heautou) was at the core of
Socrates parrhesiastic role, for
instance with regard to Alcibiades, as well as at the core of Cynic and
Stoic
philosophies.

If
we take into account the importance of harmony, respect, and courtesy
or “indirect
speech” in Eastern traditions of moral life and moral philosophy
(Jullien
2005), we might expect a fruitful dialogue with regard to parrhesia
within the field of what is now being called
intercultural information ethics (Sudweeks and Ess 2004; Capurro 2006,
Capurro
2006a). We are far away from a comprehensive view of this field. In
fact we
have just started to look at it as a phenomenon of its own. There is a
long
path of thinking ahead of us if we want to retrieve and interpret our
written
and oral traditions under this perspective through different epochs and
societies and taking into consideration their mutual influences in
practical
moral life as well as in academic and literary reflection.

As
I suggested elsewhere (Capurro 1995, 97-114) the birth of philosophy in
Greece
is related to the problematization of the concept of logos,
understood as a dialogue between autonomous peers in
contrast to the heteronomous concept of angelia
(message) as a process by which the communication of a message is
sender-dependent, although the receiver can in principle mutate into a
sender
(Capurro 2003). I use the word “problematization” in the sense
addressed by
Foucault in his lectures on parrhesia,
namely as a situation in which a behaviour or a phenomenon becomes a
problem.
According to Foucault truth-telling became a problem in a moment of
crisis of
Athenian democratic institutions in which the relations between
democracy, logos, freedom, and truth were a matter
of debate between the aristocracy and the demos
or the ordinary people. Following Foucault we can say that information
ethics
arises when a given information morality, namely the one underlying the
concept
of angelia, becomes problematic. More
generally speaking, ethics can be understood as the problematization
of morality. From this perspective information
ethics has to do with the problematization of behavioural rules about
what is
allowed or not to be communicated, by whom, and in which medium due to
basic changes
and challenges in the power structures of communication in a given
society.
Plato’s criticisms of writing, for instance in the “Phaedrus,” are, if
we read
them from this perspective, an answer to the question about what part
of and
how far a logos can be written down
and communicated through this medium. This answer is different from the
one
given by Socrates who never wrote down his arguments but who
nevertheless
questioned the kind of hierarchic message distribution in feudal
societies by replacing
the concept of angelia by that oflogos
as portrayed in Plato’s “Ion.”

Today,
after important changes in the media sphere in the 19th and
20th
centuries, we are particularly aware of the role played by media
technologies
in dealing with the externalization of human knowledge and its impact
on the
constitution of what has been called “cultural memory.” (Assmann 2000).
The
Western tradition of information ethics was characterized by two basic
ideas,
namely freedom of speech and freedom of printed works with special
emphasis on freedom
of the press. A third idea arises now, in
the age of
the networked world of electronic communication, namely freedom of
access or
the right to communicate within such a digital environment. With this
third
idea starts the short history of information ethics that began in the United States
some 20 years ago under the label computer
ethics. The confluence of these ethical concerns of computer
professionals
with the similar concerns in journalism, library and information
science, management
and business ethics, and cyberethics
or ethics of the internet has given rise to information ethics in its
present
shape (Froehlich 2004).

The recent
history of information ethics arises as a process of
problematization of behavioural norms of communication in societies
shaped by
mass media particularly since the second half of the last century. This
situation took a dramatic twist with the rise of the internet as a
horizontal
or non-hierarchic, interactive and global medium for message
production,
storage, distribution, and exchange. Information ethics understood in a
narrower sense deals with ethical questions related to the internet. It
arises
because this new medium created problems that could not be solved on
the basis
of traditional rules and roles of hierarchical generation,
distribution,
storage and exchange of messages under the premises of mass media in
democratic
societies. What do truth telling or parrhesia
mean in this new situation? We ask this question when we debate for
instance about
privacy. What can I say to whom?In
which medium? A book, a newspaper, the TV, the radio, a blog, a mailing
list, a
personal e-mail? But the question underlying information ethics is, I
believe,
of a broader nature than the problems generated by the internet. In
this
broader sense information ethics deals with questions of the
digitalization,
i.e., the reconstruction of all possible phenomena in the world as
digital
information and the problems caused by their exchange, combination and
utilization (Hausmanninger and Capurro 2002, 10).

My objective
in this paper is firstly to make a brief presentation of
what I understand to be a possible foundation of such a broad
conception of
information ethics on the basis of what I call digital ontology.
Following
Heidegger’s conception of the relation between ontology and
metaphysics, I will
argue that ontology has to do with Being itself and not just with the
Being of
beings which is the matter of metaphysics. Ontology is, in Foucault’s
terminology, the problematization of metaphysics. In a second step I
will go
into some key aspects of information ethics by putting the question of
the
ontological status of the human body in the centre of my reflections. I
will
argue that the reductionist view of the human body as digital data
overlooks
the limits of digital ontology and gives up a basis of ethical
orientation. I
will analyze some fundamental consequences of this view of information
ethics fordigital agents, the question of the
digital divide and intercultural aspects of the global digital network.
I will
also analyze some of the differences between this conception of digital
ontology and the one proposed by Luciano Floridi. Finally I will
present a long
term and a short term agenda for information ethics and will point to
the
importance of intercultural dialogue in this field.

ON DIGITAL ONTOLOGY

Some of the
following ideas on digital ontology were developed in 2001 in
an e-mail exchange with the Australian philosopher Michael Eldred
(Eldred 2001,
Capurro 2001). As Heidegger points out in “Being and Time”:

“Being,
as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class
or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its
‘universality’ is to
be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every
entity
and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being
is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of
Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and
the
necessity of the most radical individuation.” (Heidegger 1987, 62).

The meaning
of Being is beyond any kind of definite answer “if Being is
to be conceived in terms of time, and if, indeed, its various modes and
derivatives are to become intelligible in their respective
modifications and
derivations by taking time into consideration.” (Heidegger 1987, 40)
Heidegger’s “destruction” of the history of ontology is based on the
idea of
the “historicality” of Dasein or
human existence and correspondingly on the historicality of Being
itself. The
history of our self interpretations and the history of the
interpretations of
the meaning of Being are not identical but they are inseparable.
Heidegger
gives an example of how our understanding of Being has “changed over” (umgeschlagen) by explaining the genesis
of the theoretical attitude with regard to tools and physical Nature.
When a
tool, say a hammer, that is “ready-to-hand” in an everyday manner is
considered
independently of its local use within a totality of relationships, that
is,
considered with a scientific attitude it becomes a corporeal entity
“present-at-hand” subject to the law of gravity where the property of
heaviness
has no relationship to the everyday concern that the hammer is too
heavy or too
light. Its place becomes “a spatio-temporal position, a ‘world point,’
which is
in no way distinguished from any other.” (Heidegger 1987, 413). If not
only one
being but the totality of entities is articulated in such a way we get
the
methodological perspective of modern science

“in
which Nature herself is mathematically projected.
In this projection something constantly present-at-hand (matter) is
uncovered
beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by
looking at
those constitutive items in it which are quantitatively determinable
(motion,
force, location, and time). Only ‘in the light’ of Nature which has
been
projected in this fashion can anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set
up for an
experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection.”
(Heidegger
1987, 413-414).

The
“paradigmatic character of mathematical natural science” is thus not
just the application of mathematics to natural processes or the like
but the
“prior projection” of the entities it discovers. In terms of whattheory of science later on called
“paradigmatic changes” (Kuhn 1962) Heidegger’s conception of the
ontological
“change-over” articulates the process of world disclosure which
presupposes the
being-in-the-world itself of Dasein
or human existence as transcendingentities.
In other words, in order to project or ‘cast’
a world, Dasein must be concerned with Being
itself otherwise no paradigmatic change at the ontological level would
be
possible. This means not only that empirical observation is always
theory-laden
as for instance Karl Popper stresses (Popper 1973). The point addressed
by
Heidegger is more radical and concerns what the British mathematician
George
Spencer Brown calls the “unmarked space” that makes possible the
difference
between “operation” and “observation” (Spencer Brown 1973).

Following a
recent interpretation, Heidegger’s concept of Being can be
understood as equivalent to the unmarked space as conceived by the
German
sociologist Niklas Luhmann who follows Spencer Brown (Luhmann 1987;
Jahraus
2004, 236-240). In the moment of observation, which is a timely
condition, the observer necessarily “forgets” the origin of
her difference. In the case of metaphysics which operates with the
difference
“essence” (what is) and “existence” (that is) this forgetfulness
concerns Being
itself. Heidegger’s insight on Being as difference that allows any
difference
can also be also be interpreted within the framework of Fregean logic.
As the
German analytic philosopher Tobias Rosenfeldt remarks, Gottlob Frege’s
difference between “proper names” (Eigennamen)
and“functions” (Funktionsausdrücke)
can be used to understand Heidegger’s
difference between Being and beings as far as Being is not conceived as
a
property of beings (Rosenfeldt 2003). It allows us to build sentences
that make
not only a reference to objects but also distinguish between “sense” (Sinn) and “meaning” (Bedeutung). Living
beings, excluding
humans, operate with “meaning,”
i.e., with the reference of the signs, not with their “sense”. But as
Frege
shows, we need utterances with an empty position in order to build a
“proper
name,” i.e., to make a reference (true/false) to an object. Without
this “undeterminate
meaning of being” (unbestimmte Bedeutung
von Sein), as Heidegger stresses (1976, 62), there would be no
language and
beings could not be understood as what they are. Human existence deals,
according to Heidegger, with this undetermined meaning or “sense” of
being as
the “place” (Da) where determinations
or distinctions are possible. The condition of possibility for such
determinations includes also the conception of language as social
practice, a
view shared by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his “Philosophical
Investigations”
(Wittgenstein 1984). For both thinkers, human existence is conceived as
rooted
in a community, having to do practically with things in the world.
Heidegger
stresses the ethical dimension of the “self care” of human existence.
From this
perspective, ontology is not primarily a special discipline distinct
from
ethics but it is already ethics in the original sense of this word,
i.e., a foundational
view of our ethos or
being-in-the-world with others. Heidegger’s conception of ontology as a
problematization of metaphysics can be thus understood as a “weak”
conception
of Being compared to a “strong” metaphysical view, as analyzed by the
Italian
philosopher Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo 1985). In ethical terms, this
“weak” or aestheticalview of Being means a less
violent
perspective on human action and human society (Sützl 2004).

Digital
ontology is, I believe, today’s pervading casting of Being. But
what does it mean? This casting or understanding of Being is rooted in
Western
metaphysics and particularly in the procedure of separation(chorizein)
or abstracting of points and numbers from “natural beings” (physei
onta) as analyzed by Aristotle in
his “Physics” and largely discussed by Heidegger in his “Sophistes”
lectures
(Heidegger 1991). Aristotle characterizes points in view of their
placelessness
(atopos) although they are positioned
(thetos) while numbers have neither a
place nor a position (athetos)
(Aristotle 1950, II, 2). Points and geometrical structures derived from
them as
well as numbers make beings present, as Heidegger remarks, in a
different way,
namely as geometrical structures and arithmetical entities. Geometric
contemplation has a place in perception (aesthesis)
while arithmetic, by contrast, “abstracts from every sensuous dimension
and
orientation.” (Heidegger 1991, 117) Geometric entities can be treated
in their
own autonomy as far as they are separated from physical beings. One of
Heidegger’s main discoveries with regard to the question of Being was
that for
metaphysics the sense of Being is presence.As
presence – together with past and future – is a dimension
of time it follows that time is the
hidden horizon of the metaphysical interpretation of Being. According
to
Heidegger metaphysics “forgets” temporality in its full three
dimensionality by
holding only to the one-dimensional sense of presence or “standing
presence-at-hand.” If the digital casting of Being by holding only to
the
one-dimensional sense of presence forgets the question of Being in its
full
three dimensionality it “changes over” into digital metaphysics. The
difference
between digital ontology and digital metaphysics is therefore,
following this
theory, essential if we want to avoid a dogmatic theoretical position
and its
ethical consequences.

Within the
framework of today’s digital technology, points and numbers
are so to speak “in-formed” in the electromagnetic medium. This means
not just
the creation of digital beings but, more fundamentally, the
interpretation of
all beings as digital ones and their world-less representation as
“standing
presence-at-hand.” George Berkeley’s formulation concerning the nature
of
objects of knowledge, namely “Their esse
is percipi” (Berkeley 1965, 62) must
be reformulated into “to be is to be digital” or “their esse
is computari.” But
this utterance does not mean that things are conceived now as made out
of
binary digits or just that bits are different from atoms (Negroponte
1995).
Although it is true, as Luciano Floridi in the Preface to The
Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information
remarks, that

“the
information revolution has also deeply affected
what philosophers do, how they think about their problems, what
problems they
consider worth their attention, how they conceptualize their views, and
even
the vocabulary they use” (Floridi 2004, xii)

it is
important to stress that taking into consideration the concept of
ontology as already explained, the “information revolution” concerns
not just
the influence of computing and (digital) information on philosophy but
the
pervading view according to which today we believe that we understand
things in their being as far as we are able to
digitalize them. I am not claiming that all human beings or even a
specific
group, say, all computer scientists or all philosophers think or even
live
their everyday lives explicitly within this framework or that they
theoretically agree with it. My conjecture concerns the perception that
digital
ontology under the shape of digital metaphysics pervades in a prima facie trivial sense our society as
a whole including our scientific methods and our philosophical
reflection. It
is our “Zeitgeist.” The already
mentioned “Blackwell Guide” as well as the complex phenomenon of
digital
networks and society addressed for instance by the Sociologist Manuel
Castells
in his influential book on the information age are, I believe, clear
signs that
this hypothesis is well founded (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998). I am
arguing now
in favour of an ontological instead of a metaphysical interpretation of
the
digital casting of Being that allows us to relativize it. Within a
theory such
as this that avoids the blind spot of metaphysics and takes care of
Being as
the “unmarked space” of human existence the digital casting of Being
can be
interpreted not as a kind of digital Pythagoreism but as a possibility
of world casting.

TOWARDS A FOUNDATION OF
INFORMATION ETHICS

Why is this
appraisal of the difference between ontology and metaphysics
a necessary condition for the foundation of information ethics? I
think that it is so within two perspectives. The one concerns the
relativization of the digital casting of being as the metaphysics of
our time
excluding or subordinating other perspectives and dimensions of
reality. The
other one concerns the concept of human dignity and the question of
anthropocentrism in ethics. The aim of an ontological foundation of
information
ethics under the hypothesis of today’s pervading character of the
digital
casting of beingis to locate it within
a phenomenological interpretation of human existence as a de-centred
and
therefore only prima facie
anthropocentric way of being as a sufficient condition. Its leading
dimensions
concern its temporal three-dimensionality as well as its social
character or
our being-with-others in a common world. It is not possible now to
develop this
analysis as I have done elsewhere following the paths opened by the
Swiss
psychiatrist Medard Boss (Capurro 1986, Boss 1975, Riedel et al. 2003).
This
phenomenology of human existence is still open in many regards to
scientific
analysis particularly in the field of brain research.

A
basic premise of this phenomenology that takes into account our
relation to Being
as the unmarked space is indeed the de-centred nature of human
existence. Being
itself is groundless making possible all theoretical understanding and
practical
orientation. What Medard Boss following Heidegger calls “world
openness” is
this “un-marked” space of our existence as an open and finite context of
given
possibilities, past, present and future ones, in their partial and
socially
mediated disclosure. Human existence is characterized by its
“being-outside”
sharing implicitly or thematically with others the “sense” and
“meaning” of things
in changing contexts. The concept of communication addresses this
original
sharing together a common world. In a derivate sense we call
communication the
sharing of possible meanings within horizons of understanding that we
achieve
by “drawing a distinction” (Spencer Brown). Communication using
artificial
media presupposes both phenomena, namely our openness to Being as the
“unmarked
space” and the process of making differences. Our “being outside” or
openness
to the undeterminateness of Being is primarily of a pragmatic nature in
the
sense of the Greek concept of pragmata.
We have to do with things under a pre-understanding of their being
before we
start a theoretical process of making explicit the question of whether
they
exist and what they are as well as further questions of methodological
rules
for causal explanations in the sciences. Our bodily
being-in-the-world with others is the original medium of
human existence on which the instrumental view of technology in general
and of
communication technology in particular is grounded (Capurro/Pingel
2002). I call the
operation of
taking care of our bodily existence within the unmarked space of Being
the ethical difference. Human existence
means, ethically speaking, taking care of ourselves by making a
difference
between two extreme forms, namely one by which we help each other by
taking
away the care of the other and putting ourselves in her/his position,
“leaping
in” (einspringende) for her/him as
opposed to the possibility by which we “leap ahead” (vorausspringende)
of him/her in order to give his/her care back so
that he or she can take care of it (Heidegger 1987, 158-159). Between
these two
kinds of bodily oriented solicitude, one which dominates and the other
that
liberates, there are numerous mixed forms. What do we primarily take
care of?
Human existence is originally bodily existence. The body is the
primordial
medium of our being-in-the-world. Within the digital casting of Being
we can
take a distance from it and interpret it as digital data or, more
precisely, as
a digital message.

The European
Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) of
the European Commission has dedicated one of its recent Opinions
to this question within the framework of the ethical
implications of ICT (= information and communication technology)
implants in
the human body (EGE 2005). The Opinion
recalls fundamental ethical principles, such as human dignity, non
instrumentalisation, privacy, non-discrimination, informed consent,
equity, as
well as the precautionary principle that could be in conflict with the
view of
the human body as digital data as well as with the changes brought up
by new
digital technologies on human self awareness. I quote:

“Human beings
are neither purely natural nor purely cultural beings. Indeed our very
nature
depends on the possibility of transforming ourselves. Information
technologies
have been considered under this anthropomorphic bias as extensions of
man.
However, the transformation of the human body has consequences also on
the
cultural human environment. Under these premises, human beings are seen
as part
of a complex system of natural and artificial messages that function on
a
digital basis. In this sense the human body can be seen as data. This
view has
large cultural effects particularly as it precludes higher level
phenomena such
as human psyche and human language or conceives them mainly under the
perspective of its digitization, giving rise to reductionism that
oversimplifies the complex relations between the human body, language
and
imagination.” (EGE 2005, 27)

Our bodily existence
differs, as Medard Boss remarks (1975, 271-285) from the mere physical
presence
of things in that we exist as temporal and spatial three-dimensional
beings
exposed to the indeterminateness of Being. The
limits of my bodily existence are, paradoxically speaking, identical to
the
ones of my world-openness (Boss 1975, 278; Capurro 1994a,b). This
special
existential statute of the human body is, I believe, a non-metaphysical
interpretation of what we call in ethics, particularly since Immanuel
Kant,
human dignity.The moral imperative
concerns basically the respect for our bodily existence in this
particular
existential sense which includes its finitude as the extension between
natality
and mortality as well as its groundless indeterminacy that questions
all our
theoretical and/or practical ambitions of filling it with any kind of
representations or artifacts. A de-centered existence in this full
sense is
indeed a tragic but not necessarily a hopeless or even an unhappy
existence.
The source of morality as the possibility of going beyond our
self-interest can
be found in this de-centered nature that manifests itself also as being
able to
give only a finite response to the necessities of bodily life. This
conception
is thus neither anthropocentric nor ontocentric, as no being, neither
natural
nor artificial, is assigned a prerogative to be beyond the unmarked
space which
is itself no centre or “no-thing.” Our specific moral dignity is
grounded in
our capacity to exist facing and actively responding to this phenomenon
that
manifests itself in between us and particularly, as Emmanuel
Lévinas rightly
stresses, in the bodily face-to-face encounter with the Other
(Lévinas 1968), and
in our taking care of our bodily existence by “leaping in” or “ahead.”
Bodily
existence implies our relation to tangible things. According to Albert
Borgman,
community is created around “focal things” (Borgmann 1992). It is not
necessarily eliminated but impoverished by digital communication(Feenberg and Barney 2004). The moral
obligation
is largely absent in virtual communities (Tabachnick
and Koivukoski
2004). We could speak in this case of a thing-oriented ethics.

This existential or
world-related concept of morality contradicts in some regards the
Kantian view
according to which to be human means on the one hand to be a part of
the
phenomenal world (homo phaenomenon)
as a “sensual being” (Sinnenwesen),
while we are on the other hand members of the “kingdom of ends in
themselves” (Reich der Zwecke) and therefore of noumenal nature (homo noumenon) (Kant
1977, 550; Kant 1974, 69). If we follow Kant
it is not possible to assign any kind of moral autonomy to artificial
agents,
digital or whatever because we cannot make them transcend natural
conditions by
giving them artificially autonomy and personality which are grounded in
our given membership of the noumenal
world. This foundation of
morality is metaphysical although it is not based on theoretical
knowledge but
on the practical and “factual” experience of the moral imperative.
There is a
clear cut between moral human agents on the one hand and pure natural
beings as
well as artifacts on the other. Kant’s ethics is prima
facie human species oriented but not just to us as members of
a natural species. According to Kant humans are not moral beings just
because
they are intelligent. Intelligence can be also a quality of a “living
corporeal
being” that Kant imagines as an “intelligent natural being” (vernünftiges
Naturwesen) (Kant 1977, 550).
We could correspondingly imagine an “intelligent artificial being” but
without
any kind of obligation towards himself, i.e., without the moral
obligation of
“respecting humanity in his personality.” (Kant 1977, 550) In other
words,
there is a metaphysical difference between “intelligent natural beings”
as
worldly “sensual beings” (Sinnenwesen)
and “intellectual beings” (Vernunftwesen)
– Kant considers the possibility of “holy” ones as different to humans
as
“unholy beings” (Kant 1977, 508) – who belong to the noumenal
world not because of their intelligence but because their
freedom and personality are rooted in this “kingdom” and whose dignity
is
therefore absolute. If we follow Kant, we can create artificial
intelligent
agents but they would never be able to act as moral beings.

I would like to propose an
alternative view on the potential moral status of artifacts and digital
agents
based on existential ontology. In his Marburg
lectures on the concept of time Heidegger compares the representation
of a
capsule-like subjectivity with a snail that comes out of its shell to
have
contact with the world. This coming out does not produce its relation
to the
world. Quite the contrary. It is just a modification of a former
relation. The
snail, respectively the way of being Heidegger calls Dasein,
is already in the world also when she is in her shell. If
this would be also the case for the relation of water in a glass to the
world
we would say that water has the way of being of Dasein
(Heidegger 1979, 224). This comparison is not meant in the
sense that Heidegger equalizes the way of being of Dasein
with the one of snails or of other living beings, which are
neither “world-less,” like life-less matter, nor “world-shaping” but
“world-poor” (Heidegger 1983, § 42). “World-poor” does not mean,
as Heidegger
remarks, that this kind of being would be of “lower level” than the way
of
being called Dasein. Heidegger
writes: “Rather is life a field with an own richness of openness that
probably
the human world does not know about.” (Heidegger 1983, 371-372). This
phenomenological analysis has large consequences not only for instance
with
regard to the highly controversial question of artificially producing
and
patenting organic life (Capurro 2005a) but also with regard to the
question of
whether artificial (digital) agents as we know them today on the
internet but
also in the field of robotics might be considered as being in an at
least
potential moral relation to human beings whose moral being is
characterized by
sharing a common world within the horizon of Being as an unmarked space
and
taking care of their bodily existence. It is, one could speculate, in
principle
possible to produce what we could call existential
artificiality (Capurro 1995a) in which case artifacts should have a
bodily
and three-dimensional temporal finite existence. I do not believe that
the
creation of such agents can be done on the basis of algorithms. It
would be a
contradiction to program an unmarked space which is the condition of
possibility
for creating such programs that today just simulate cognitive systems
(Diebner
2003). In order for a being to will it must be open to the “unmarked
space” as
to will means to be related to what is not. Our present digital agents
are
merely artifacts of our marked
desires. If we trust software agents this does not mean that they are
capable
of making a moral decision. It is even not necessary to believe that
they have
a disposition to act morally, autonomy being a necessary but not a
sufficient
condition for morality (Weckert 2005, 411).

In other words, if we
consider as the ground of morality not, as Kant does, our belonging to
a
metaphysical world, but the very fact of living in the world with
others
exposed to the indeterminateness of Being and responsible for each
other as
well as for what appears in the world-openness including our artificial
products, then we would say that an artificial bodily agent sharing
these
characteristics could be considered as a moral agent (Floridi/Sanders
2004). Let the question
remain
open as to how far artificial existence necessarily implies, as Massimo
Negrotti in his theory of artificiality remarks (Negrotti 1999, 2002),
a
difference to human existence. Although I see no impossibility in
principle to
creating it, I do believe that the kind of digital agents and robots we
produce
at the moment are far away from this target. The question is then if we
should
strive for it considering for instance the simple but challenging fact
that the
majority of human beings to which we are morally committed to take care
of live
in extreme poverty and lack any kind of active help on the side of the
ones who
could “leap in” or “leap ahead” into their existence. To invest
research time
and money in order to create “humanoids” towards whom we would be
morally committed
seems to me particularly in view of this situation not a question of an
anthropocentric morality but of cynicism.

The “infosphere,” as
Luciano Floridi calls it, is characterized by the “in-formation” of
points and
numbers in the electromagnetic medium. This means an abstraction from
bodily as
well as from space-time conditions. As the Canadian information
scientist Bernd
Frohmann stresses, “ethics concerns the body” (Frohmann 2000, 428). He
criticizes the one-sided view of the digital casting of Being
particularly with
regard to the human body by taking as an outstanding example Pierre
Lévy’s
anthropology (Lévy 1997) that he characterizes as a “disembodied
ethics of
angels” (Frohmann, 2000, 428). According to Frohmann, to become a
“moral agent”
means “to acquire the virtues required to help create and sustain the
networks
of dependence, those of giving and receiving.” (Frohmann, 2000, 427)
Following
MacIntyre’s Thomistic reading of Aristotle’s ethics (MacIntyre 1999),
Frohmann
stresses that rational judgment must join moral faculties in order to
constitute
a human being. A society of pure
rational agents whose will is not rooted, to put it in Kantian terms,
in a noumenal world, is basically a-moral.
This is the reason why I believe that it is a basic goal of an
ontological
foundation of information ethics to deconstruct the idea of the
infosphere as
an autonomous sphere, independent of the phenomenal world of embodied
human
agents taking care of each other, and built as a society of pure
rational digital agents, a kind of
parody of the angelic world. The digital network we call the internet
allows us
indeed to develop new forms of relating to each other in space and time
because
our being is already opened to the unmarked space of existence. The
internet
opens new possibilities of acting in and through it into the bodily
existential
space but it creates at the same time a sphere of permanent virtual
digital
presence that is characteristic of the metaphysical casting of Being.
By giving
this sphere the priority in our individual and social lives, i.e., by
giving it
a metaphysical instead of an ontological character, we might be
deprived in
various degrees not only of the dimensions of past and future but also
of the
realm of bodily and thing-related existence.

Information
ethics is therefore concerned not only with the question of an “ethics
in the
infosphere” (Floridi 2001) but basically with an ethics of
the infosphere. An ontological foundation of information ethics
aims at questioning the metaphysical realm of the digital casting of
Being
particularly in view of what Luciano Floridi calls a “plurality of
ontologies”
according to the different classes of “information entities” (Floridi
1999).
The theory I am proposing now is, to use Floridi’s terminology, neither
“bio-centric” nor “anthropocentric,” or “onto-centric.” It aims at
de-centering
metaphysics, of whatever kind, by considering the “unmarked space” as a
difference that allows us not only theoretically but also pragmatically
to
relativise our “egocentric” ambitions – particularly at the moment as
we think
we would enlarge them by creating new autonomous agents in the
infosphere – as
well as the moral ambitions of the infosphere altogether whose
“properties” and
“regions” are described by Floridi (1999). Indeed agere
sequitur esse as Floridi remarks (1999pdf, 41) but Thomas
Aquinas distinguishes between actiones
hominis and actiones humanae,
(Thomas Aquinas 1923, 1-2, q. 1, a.1, c),
i.e., between actions done by humans and actions having their origin in
deliberate will and rationality. In other words, I think that we should
be
careful in considering “information objects” and their actions as
having an
intrinsic value or even a dignity particularly in the moral sense of
the word
(Floridi 2003). According to Floridi “the minimal level of agency is
the mere
presence of an implemented information entity (in Heideggerian terms,
the Dasein – the therebeinghood – of an
information entity implemented in the infosphere.” (Floridi 1999pdf,
15). Well,
this is exactly what Heidegger’s Dasein
is not, namely mere presence! Neither Heidegger’s nor Kant’s ethics are
“anthropocentric” (Floridi 1999pdf). Kant’s ethics is centred on reason
(Vernunft) which means that there might be
other “intellectual beings” (Vernunftwesen)
as we have already seen. Heidegger’s Dasein
is by no means equal to “human” although it characterizes our way of
being.
Moreover, Dasein itself is decentred
by Being.

The ethical question asked
by information ethics is not just, as Floridi and Sanders state: “What
is good
for an information entity and the infosphere in general?” (Floridi /
Sanders
2002, 8) but: “What is good for our bodily being-in-the-world with
others in
particular?” The infosphere is there, but cui
bono? This is, prima facie, an
anthropocentric view if we forget the “unmarked space.” I am byin no way diminishing the importance
of the digital casting of Being in our individual and social lives. But
we
should not identify the grasping of, say, our bodies as data, with the
phenomenon of the body itself and its existential dimensions. Although
in an
increasing number of cases and situations the damage or even
destruction of the
digital can have a direct impact on the bodily life of people and
institutions,
the protection of these data is founded not on the dignity of the
digital but
on the human dimensions they refer to. We are not morally obliged to
respect
the digital being of SPAM mails as we consider them a morally evil or
negentropic action against the infosphere. As Floridi himself remarks:

“Things
have various degrees of intrinsic
value and hence demand various levels of moral respect, from the low
level
represented by an overridable, disinterested, appreciative and careful
attention for the properties of an information object like a customer
profile
to the high-level, absolute respect for human dignity.” (Floridi
2003pdf, 37)

Floridi’s
thesis, “that anything that is, insofar
as it is, deserves some respect qua
entity” (Floridi 2003pdf, 41) is a classical metaphysical utterance: ens et bonum convertuntur (“being and good
correlate”). His concept of “messages” as actions that may be (morally)
“unworthy” as far as they “affect other information objects either
positively
or negatively” (Floridi 2003pdf, 40) could become part of a future
message
theory without restricting the concept of messages to electronic ones
(Capurro
2003). Luhmann’s theory of social systems offers a theoretical
framework for
such a theory in which the concept of message (Mitteilung)
plays a key role coupled with information and
understanding as building the phenomenon of communication (Luhmann
1987). A message
is the action of offering something (potentially) meaningful (Sinnangebot) to another social system.
Today’s message society is
characterized by its interactive and non-hierarchical structure in
contrast to
the mass media society of the 20th Century in which the
one-to-many
structure was prevalent. This does not mean that possible conflicts on
what kind
of messages can be considered as, say,
worthless or unworthy is less difficult to analyze from an ethical
perspective
than it was in former times. Equating evil with digital entropy
restricts this
problem to the infosphere.

CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS

The
consequences of the ontological foundation of information ethics I am
suggesting here are large. They concern such basic issues as the
so-called digital divide that should not be
understood primarily as a question of how people can get access to the
internet
but on how the digital casting of Beings affects, for better or for
worse, our
everyday lives and cultures (Scheule et al. 2004). Instead of viewing
human
existence as part of the global digital network, we should twist this
perspective. “Localizing the Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural
Perspective” was the title of an international symposium organized by
the International Center for Information Ethics
(ICIE) and sponsored by VolkswagenStiftung
(Capurro et al. 2006).Information
ethics addresses questions of the intersection of the infosphere with
the ecological,
political, economic, and cultural spheres such as:

How far is the internet
changing local cultural values and traditional ways of life?

How far do these changes
affect the life and culture of future societies in a global and local
sense?

How far do traditional
cultures and their moral values communicate and transform themselves
under the impact of the digital infosphere in general and of the
internet in particular?

Intercultural
information ethics is a field of research where moral questions of the
infosphere are reflected in a comparative manner on the basis of
different
cultural traditions. Michael Walzer distinguishes between “thick” and
“thin”
morality, i.e., between moral arguments as rooted or located in a
culture as
opposed to disembodied ones (Walzer 1994). It is a misunderstanding to
envisage
the intercultural “thick” ethical dialogue for instance in relation to
the
validity of human rights as a kind of moral relativism. Universality
is, in
Kantian terms, a regulative idea that can only be perceived and
partially
achieved within the plural conditions of human reason, i.e., through a
patient
intercultural dialogue on the maxims that may guide our actions. The
concept of
humanity and consequently the concept of human rights need permanent
interpretation
on the basis of an intercultural ethical dialogue.

At
the practical-political level, i.e., as a short term agenda, we need
indeed a “Declaration of Principles” and an “Action
Plan” such as the ones issued by
the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS). The basic moral principle of the infosphere is the
one
already proclaimed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, namely to
share
knowledge with others or, to put it in the present digital context, the
right
to communicate in a digital environment which includes the right to
preserve
what we communicate for future generations. The question of
intellectual
ownership on the basis of copyright and patenting has been criticized
by such
initiatives as Open Source and Free
Software and has lead in the
scientific arena to projects such as the Public
Library of Science or to the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the
Humanities
(2003). It is indeed a good
approach to reflect on this complex area
with the metaphor “information ecology” that has been used for instance
in Germany
since the late eighties (Capurro 1990). The question of media and the
question
of institutions that preserve media and messages are at the core of
what the
French sociologist Régis Debray calls “mediology.” (Debray
2000). Thus
communication and tradition become the core of information ethics in
the
digital age. A short term agenda includes also for instance the
question of how
information is not only shared but also searched. Search engines have
become a
core social technology with large ethical implications (Nagenborg
2005).
Pervasive computing and nanotechnology and its confluence with brain
research
and biotechnology are the challenges ahead. But we need, I think, also
a long
term agenda for information ethics whose aim is a patient and broad
intercultural dialogue that includes also other epochs as well as other
information and communication media as the digital ones. We should not
restrict
information ethics to questions of the infosphere.

The
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes three major spherological
projects in the history of Western culture (Sloterdijk 1998, 1999,
2004). The
first one is the globalization of reason in Greek philosophy which
bursts with
the rise of modern science. The second one is the earthly globalization
that
begins in Europe in the 15th
Century and bursts in the 20th Century as the imperial
ambitions of
modern Western subjectivity are questioned by other centres of power.
The third
one being the digital globalization that bursts economically very soon
after
its emergence. In fact the burst of the infosphere means that we become
aware
of the difference between the digital and the physical not just with
regard to
the physical world but also to the cultural dimensions of human
existence. The
question of how the information and communication technologies affect
human
cultures is a key ethical issue (Sudweeks and Ess 2004; Capurro et al.
2006).
The appropriation of modern information technology is not just a
technical but
a cultural endeavour. Our present debates on privacy – a rebirth in
some regard
of the classical question of parrhesia
– show clearly how deeply the use of this technology can affect our
moral lives
and how different its interpretation can be according to cultural
backgrounds
and traditions. A recent dialogue that started as an e-mail exchange on
privacy
between two Japanese colleagues, Makoto Nakada and Takanori Tamura, and
myself
showed us how deeply cultural biased our conceptions are (Nakada and
Tamura
2005; Capurro 2005).

Also
this ontological foundation of information ethics is deeply rooted in
Western
philosophy. This concerns not only its questions and terminology but
also its
very aim of making conceptually explicit basic rules and
presuppositions of
human behaviour and human nature and by trying to give them a rational
foundation even if it is eventually a groundless one. Perhaps an
intercultural
dialogue will bring about productive criticisms and new perspectives
about this
endeavour or even a completely different view of what I mean by an
ontological
foundation of information ethics. Information ethics can be considered
then as
the open space where an intercultural dialogue about these issues can
and
should take place. It is up to us to practice parrhesia
when giving reasons for our theories.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks to Ms Heather Bradshaw (Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical
Ethics) for her comments and criticisms as well
as for polishing my English.